The geothermal energy of thermal groundwater is currently being exploited for district-scale heating in many locations world-wide. The Carboniferous bedrock in the south and east of Ireland hosts a number of thermal springs with temperatures ranging from 12 â 25 Â°C. These temperatures are elevated with respect to average Irish groundwater temperatures (9.5 â 10.5 Â°C), and represent a geothermal energy potential, which is currently under evaluation. This thesis furthers our understanding of the sources, circulation pathways and temporal variations of the Irish thermal springs, by using a multi-disciplinary methodology (including audio-magnetotelluric (AMT) geophysical surveying, time-lapse temperature and chemistry measurements, and hydrochemical analysis) to develop hydrogeological conceptual models for several of these springs.
A sub-set of six springs in the Carboniferous limestones of the Dublin Basin were examined. Seasonal hydrochemical data were explored using multivaria...

Tissue engineered organs and implants hold promise for the replacement of damaged and diseased organs. However, the foreign body response (FBR) is a major obstacle that compromises the function of tissue engineered constructs, typically causing them to fail. Two components of the FBR are the inflammatory response and a lack of vascularization. To overcome these, this project has delivered anti-inflammatory and pro-angiogenic nucleic acids. A collagen system was developed to release interleukin-6 (IL-6) siRNA and endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) pDNA in a staggered manner. Collagen hollow microspheres were fabricated using a template-method and displayed an ability to load and release pDNA, maintaining the capability to transfect 3T3 fibroblasts in vitro, while reducing vector-associated toxicity. Following the identification of an optimal microsphere size, hollow collagen microspheres were assembled into a collagen sphere-in-hydrogel system that displayed a staggered release...

THESIS 9368High resolution imaging of the continental slope west of the Porcupine Bank by the Irish National Seabed Survey reveals an area that is smooth and relatively undisturbed. The area lacks evidence of debris flows and canyon complexes that are prevalent on most other slope sections of the Rockall Trough, presenting a unique opportunity to examine cores along a depth transect without the issue of major down slope redistribution of sediments. Previous examinations of cores from the study area have revealed an absence of sedimentological evidence for significant gravity related remobilization and suggested that a record of bottom current activity interacting with the sea-floor is preserved.

THESIS 10282Sedimentary rocks are the most abundant hthologies on the Earth, covering over 70% of the planet?s surface. Quantitative dating of sedimentary rocks (especially those devoid of fossils) is critical to understanding the past events and rates and duration of processes that shaped the Earth. Recent advances in geochronology of sedimentary rocks, such as Re-Os dating of organic-rich shales and U-Pb dating of authigenic xenotime, allow precise depositional and early diagenetic ages to be obtained, respectively, with uncertainties potentially as low as 0.7% (2?). However, compared to the techniques commonly used in constructing the geological timescale (U-Pb dating of zircon and 40Ar-39Ar dating of volcanic rocks), they are still in the early stages of development. One of the major triggers for the interest in direct dating of sedimentary rocks is the ability to constrain further the ages of globally distributed Neoproterozoic glacial deposits, which provide one of the ke...

The Morris water maze has been extensively used in the study of spatial learning and
memory, and a number of hippocampal, parahippocampal and neocortical brain regions
have been identified as necessary for successful performance in this task. Immediate
Early Genes (IEGs) have been implicated in learning and memory processes, and are
used as markers of neural activity in a brain region in response to learning tasks. The use
of adequate control conditions in these tasks has been identified as important, and we
devised a novel control condition in an attempt to address these concerns. We examined
the expression of IEGs over the course of spatial learning, finding that Zif268 expression
was upregulated in a number of regions during early learning, and that c-Fos was
upregulated during late learning. We investigated the role of IEGs in cellular
consolidation at different time-points in the hours following learning, but we did not find
support for multiple waves of IEG expression as previ...

Combinational medical devices have evolved rapidly over the last 20 years, to be minimally
invasive in order to reduce patient risk and recovery times. However the Manufacturing and
Quality control of these devices has not kept pace with the advances in design technology.
Instead the industry relies on eighty year old, end of line, acceptance sampling methods, due in
part to destructive nature of some of the tests but mostly due to hesitancy in embracing new
technological concepts. The regulatory bodies have acknowledged this hesitancy and are
encouraging the use of Process analytical technology (PAT) concepts to understand and control
process variation at source. Two strands of research were required to meet this challenge. The
first is to develop real time non destructive assessment methods and the second requirement is
to develop an approach for the statistical assessment of the overall process in real time.
This thesis investigates the application of this technology on two criti...

Describing a population in space and time may provide essential information to govern regimes for the effective and sustainable management of that population. Some fish species exhibit naturally complex and changeable patterns of distribution relating to their life history characteristics, biological requirements (which may vary between ages and seasons), the environment, climate change and human factors. Where this is the case, investigating a populations distribution in varying spatial (and temporal) scales has the advantage of being able to extract a more ecosystem focused and detailed pattern of possible causes for and therefore implications of a particular distribution. The northeast Atlantic supports some of the world's most highly productive fish stocks and as a result is impacted heavily by human activity. Northeast Atlantic waters are highly dynamic with complex oceanographic and hydrographic features which are responding significantly and variably to a changing climat...

The Jewish community of Dublin has been in existence for 400 years. Nowadays, many Dublin Jews are descended from Lithuanians who settled in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. Most Dublin Jews are integrated into Dublin society, yet little is known of cultural practices specific to Dublin’s Jewish community. This dissertation focuses on the practice of liturgical music in Terenure synagogue, one of Dublin’s two remaining Orthodox synagogues. While music is an integral part of all synagogue services throughout the year, the musical repertoire of the Sabbath morning service has been selected as representing the music which is most commonly experienced by practicing Orthodox Jews in Dublin. Much of the music in Dublin’s Orthodox synagogue has been retained as part of a Lithuanian oral tradition. However, the Dublin Jewish community is currently undergoing a demographic shift, owing to the emigration of Dublin-born Jews coupled with migration into Dublin of Jews from a variety...

This thesis examines important issues of Irish vernacular Catholicism, Irish religious and cultural identities, the impacts of modernity plus socio-religious and economic change on traditional religiosity, sacred landscape and topophilia, religious material culture, folk and individual creativity, gender roles and expectations, and devotional subcultures through the vehicle of Marian apparitions and their aftermath in the Republic of Ireland in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This thesis examines in detail five Irish Marian shrines as case studies; Knock shrine (Co. Mayo), Ballinspittle and Mitchelstown grottoes (Co. Cork), Mount Melleray grotto (Co. Waterford) and the Marian shrines of Inchigeela in West Cork and the attached houses of prayer. Key themes include; vernacular religious theory; the nature of Irish indigenous Catholicism; local, global and transnational trends in contemporary Irish devotional life; areas of individual creativity, fluidity and agency in Marian ...

<p>The working environment for hospital doctors in Ireland has undergone radical change in recent years with hospital posts becoming unattractive to doctors in training and to consultants. For young medical graduates, the tensions between training requirements and service demands have contributed to a ‘brain drain’ with over half leaving to work abroad after graduation. Many consultant posts are vacant or are filled on a temporary basis, impacting on the quality of patient care.</p>
<p>This study sets out to fill a gap in the Irish literature by exploring the topic of wellbeing in hospital doctors. It is a mixed method study using both qualitative and quantitative techniques.</p>
<p>The first research question (what are the most significant workplace stressors to which hospital doctors in the Irish public hospital setting are exposed?) was explored using the Delphi methodology. This allowed individual opinion from a geographically dispersed population t...

Sensors, mobile devices and social platforms generate an immense amount of stream data in various formats and schemata. For these areas, the idea of Linked Stream Data is to extend RDF data model to cope with the heterogeneity of data sources and to enable the data integrationÂ¿not only among themselves, but also with other existing sources. This would enable a vast range of new, near real-time applications. Such applications drive the demand for processing engines that support continuous queries over Linked Stream Data and Linked Data. These engines must not only support the necessary functionalities but also meet the typical low-latency response requirement of stream processing applications.
Since unmodified data stream management systems (DSMSs) and triple storages do not provide full functionalities required by Linked Stream Data processing, the rewriting approach could be used to delegate the processing to those systems. However, this suffers from the overhead of data transform...

THESIS 10926Males and individuals under the age of 25 are injured or killed while driving more than other demographic groups. While this overrepresentation is said to be the result of a greater number of aberrant driving behaviours in these groups, it is also noted that not all younger individuals and males engage in risk-taking while driving. Research has demonstrated greater levels of both trait and behavioural impulsiveness in drivers with a history of aberrant driving tendencies, suggesting that heightened impulsivity may be an individual difference factor that contributes to risky driving. The current study aimed to replicate and expand on these findings by including a neuroimaging component. Chapter one puts the research into context by presenting official statistics of collision involvement by age and gender, as well as a review of the factors that are thought to contribute to such collisions. This chapter also explores the literature related to risk taking and impulsivi...

THESIS 10876Men represent a growing minority of the overall population of informal carers with their requirement to provide care increasing as changes in traditional family structures take place and the focus of Government policy on community based care intensifies. The number of people with dementia in Ireland is predicted to increase threefold between 2021 and 2041. At the same time, Ireland is set to have the largest growth in the older population across the EU and the number of people with dementia is predicted to dramatically intensify (Trepel 2011). A major void exists in relation to research on male caring in Ireland and it was envisaged that through listening to the stories of a sample of male carers, useful insights into their experiences of providing care to a loved one or close relative with dementia would be provided. Research Aim, Objectives and Question: The aim of this qualitative study was to explore and give an initial understanding of the experiences of men wh...

In an era where economic turbulence is constant with many organisations rightsizing to remain competitive, customer value improvement (CVI) is central to organisational strategy. As a panacea for this customer value improvement or continuous improvement challenge, many excellence frameworks and improvement methodologies have guided organisations to performance improvement since the 1980s. Despite their popularity, numerous authors have reported inadequacies and have made calls for improvement. Consequently, the research aim for this study was to review customer value improvement with a view to developing and validating a new customer value improvement (CVI) framework and to provide deeper knowledge and understanding of customer value improvement for increased organisational return on investment ROI.
As part of the first strand of the literature review, a review of the effectiveness of the MBNQA Award and the EFQM Excellence Model was carried out. The second strand reviewed the effec...

Networked control systems have been widely used in Industrial Automation
since the latter part of the 20st century. Such networks have evolved from small
systems with proprietary and slow Fieldbus technology to a much larger scope.
Today, Ethernet-based automation systems encompass whole factories and carry
large amounts of data traffic with differing latency requirements. Proprietary
real-time Ethernet technologies such as Profinet IRT (Isochronous Real-Time)
have demonstrated the feasibility of real-time Ethernet for even the most demanding
applications such as functional safety and motion control. The drawback
of these vendor-specific solutions is their dependence on proprietary ASICs
(Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) and their very limited compatibility
to standard Ethernet and Bridging as defined by IEEE (Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers) 802.3 and IEEE 802.1. Up to the present day, this
has limited the widespread success of Ethernet as a real-time netw...

In this thesis, I discuss each stage in the development of a new method for identifying
site specific evolutionary rates, from conception of the idea, through the
implementation to its application to data. TIGER, or tree independent generation of
evolutionary rates, is based largely around the works of LeQuesne (1989), Wilkinson
(1998) and Pisani (2004) and the premise that sites in a multi-state character matrix
could be scored based on the level of agreement it displays with the other sites. In
these earlier studies, however, agreement was measured in binary manner: sites were
either compatible with each other or they are not. TIGER allows various degrees of
agreement to occur between two sites, allowing it to pick up more subtle signals in the
data.
After implementing the method into a software program, it could be applied to data.
Using a combination of simulated and empirical datasets, TIGER was shown to
produce desirable results. In particular, removal of sites identified by T...

THESIS 9176Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are widely used to model numerous real-life
phenomena. However, transition densities of most of the SDE models used in practice
are not known, making both likelihood based and Bayesian inference difficult. Methods
for Bayesian inference have mainly relied on MCMC based methods which are computationally
expensive. There is a need to develop a computationally efficient method
which will provide accurate inference.
This thesis introduces a new approach to approximate Bayesian inference for SDE
models. This approach is not MCMC based and aims to provide a more efficient
option for Bayesian inference on SDE models. This research problem was motivated
by a civil engineering problem of modeling the force exerted by vehicles on the road
surface as they traverse it.
Proposed here two new methods to implement this approach. These methods have
been named as the Gaussian Modified Bridge Approximation (GaMBA) and its extension
GaMBA- Impor...

The impact of the Vietnam War conditioned the Carter administration’s response to the Nicaraguan revolution in ways that reduced US engagement with both sides of the conflict. It made the countries of Latin America counter the US approach and find their own solution to the crisis, and allowed Cuba to play a greater role in guiding the overthrow of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. This thesis re-evaluates Carter’s policy through the legacy of the Vietnam War, because US executive anxieties about military intervention, Congress’s increasing influence, and US public concerns about the nation’s global responsibilities, shaped the Carter approach to Nicaragua. Following a background chapter, the Carter administration’s policy towards Nicaragua is evaluated, before and after the fall of Somoza in July 1979. The extent of the Vietnam influence on US-Nicaraguan relations is developed by researching government documents on the formation of US policy, including material from t...

Introduction: Glaucoma is a multifactorial condition that will often result in complete bilateral blindness if untreated. Elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) is both a major risk factor and indicator of disease. IOP is maintained by the balance between production of aqueous humour (AH) by the ciliary processes and hydrodynamic resistance to its outflow through the conventional outflow pathway comprising the trabecular meshwork (TM) and Schlemm?s canal (SC). Since a significant proportion of glaucoma patients develop resistance to pressure-reducing topical formulations, there remains a significant unmet clinical need for medications acting upon the conventional pathway. Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) contribute to conventional aqueous outflow homeostasis through their capacity to remodel extracellular matrices, which has a direct impact on aqueous outflow resistance and IOP. In this regard, an AAV-mediated gene therapy targeting the conventional outflow pathway using an MMP secret...

<p>Platelet behaviour on immobilized vascular proteins has been explored to great length over the last four decades. While light transmission aggregometry remains the gold standard of platelet function testing, the ability to assess platelet function in more physiological conditions would be preferential.</p>
<p>To this end, we have developed a novel shear mediated parallel plate flow chamber with a view to assessing platelet behaviour on reproducible vascular protein surfaces, providing a quantitative assessment of this platelet protein interaction.</p>
<p>This thesis will describe in detail the optimization and characterization of immobilized Von Willebrand Factor and collagen protein surfaces to provide reproducible vascular protein surfaces. The development of a custom designed novel software to quantitatively assess this platelet protein interaction, and the subsequent development of a novel hydrodynamically shaped microfluidic flow device to consi...

THESIS 8238Rhinosinusitis is one of the three most common disorders presenting to primary care physicians, generating high socioeconomic costs (Moss and Parsons 1986; Poole 1999). Understanding the pathomechanisms of inflammation, especially in chronic rhinosinusitis and nasal polyposis, is critical to improving disease treatment. My work focuses on a novel inflammatory mediator glycodelin.

THESIS 8705This study is an action research project which sets out to introduce, develop and evaluate an intervention model specifically designed to meet the needs of high functioning children with autism, integrating principles from Behavioural and Cognitive therapy to the Drama in Education model. Prior to the application of the model to a range of problems associated with autistic spectrum disorders, two experiments were conducted to establish the methodological validity of the model as a means of converting neutral stimuli into reinforcers. Eight children participated in the study, and underwent a pre and post intervention stimulus preference assessment, that indicated a shift in preference towards the target stimuli in six of the participants, in the post intervention condition that none had opted for in the pre-interv'ention stimulus preference assessment. These findings offer an alternative to the traditional behaviour analytical explanation suggesting that secondar...

THESIS 9208Background: Platelet aggregation Is essential for vascular haemostasis and thrombosis. Inhibition of platelet aggregation underpins the pharmacological and clinical effects of antiplatelet drugs. These effects are commonly quantified using methods and devices that assess platelet aggregation under static conditions in macroscale. However, current devices neither mimic the conditions found in human microvasculature nor detect microaggregates.
Aim: To provide pharmacological characteristics of a novel method of flow- induced platelet aggregation using a commercially available nanoscale resolution device, the Quartz Crystal Microbalance with Dissipation (Q-Sense? E4).

Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) performance is a function of the composite of the
decision-making processes within the enterprise. Owner managers are conscious of the gap in their decision-making efficacy and acknowledge that the process is often
unstructured and over reliant on ‘gut feel’. While there is a drive to introduce better
decision aids, such as ERP implementations, their propensity to provide data rather than
information does not speak coherently to the decision context within the SME. Owner
managers typically resort to ex-post accounting measures (often on spreadsheets) as the basis for enterprise decision-making. This would suggest that the understanding of the SME operational decision needs has not been well articulated either in the literature or in current practice. A better understanding of the decision needs structure would facilitate the selection and deployment of more effective decision aids within SMEs.
The purpose of this thesis is to provide such a structure...

THESIS 8487Inflammation is a physiological process initiated in response to an injury or infection. Proper execution of the inflammatory response requires activation of several pro- inflammatory transcription factors. Nuclear Factor kappa B (NF?B), Activator protein-1 (AP-1) and Signal Transducers and Activators of Transcription (STAT) proteins are some of the well-characterised pro-inflammatory transcription factors. These transcription factors are inducible and regulate the expression of a range of genes involved in important biological processes such as the innate and adaptive immunity, inflammation, cellular stress responses, cell adhesion, apoptosis and proliferation. Regulation of these transcription factors is crucial since dysregulated inflammatory response can lead to acute or chronic inflammatory diseases. Investigations in our laboratory revealed that SNP in a potential immune/inflammation regulatory gene NFKBIL-1 was associated with increased susceptibility to Coeli...